Saturday, March 31, 2012

The newly elected sheriff of SF, a Mr Mirikarimi, is in trouble because he got into it with his wife and bruised her arm. He refuses to resign.

Two notable responses. Members of the "LGBT" community are giving him a lot of slack, because he has been very pro LGBT. Astonishing to read wymyn quoted in the local LGBT rag asserting that since his misbehavior was private and not a dereliction of official duty, he need not leave his job. Can you imagine if a Republican sheriff smacked his lady on the arm? RightWing War Against Women, Part 7. Whatever happened to "the personal is political"? Tribal allegiance rules.

Second, the local police chief justified his charging Mr Mirikarimi because it is part of his campaign "to end domestic violence." Note the language. End. Our lingo is so inflated that in order to show moral seriousness we must speak embarrassing impossibilities. ("No Child Left Behind".) I am unaware of any crime which has ever been ended, unless the law was changed to legalize it.

Friday, March 30, 2012

Well, my other laptop is history. The screen had a nervous breakdown. I spent 60 dollars installing a new keyboard before the video card acted up. Now I have a new laptop. After only 15 months. Toshiba will not get my business again.

I have online storage, so all my data is safe, but I have to reinstall all the software.

And my email. First my gmx.com account refused to send anything to any hotmail account, which includes the person I email the most. Now it will not send anything at all to anyone and tells me that I have been "banned due to abuse."

The gmx forums make clear that this is a bug, but so far no response from gmx and I have had to use my alternate gmail account. Unless it clears up soon, I'll move over to gmail entirely.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Like liberty and justice, diversity and inclusion sound liked natural buddies, but are in fact quite fractiously tense.

The decision at (private) Vanderbilt University is exemplary. Diversity invites all kinds of differences. But inclusion dislikes the very boundaries which describe differences. So the university has recently declare that any and all student associations, including religious one, must open not only their membership but their leadership to anyone at all. So a Muslim could join the Catholic Newman Club and run for its president.

This is not optional. So the Catholics are leaving the campus to set up organizational shop outside it.

So the end result of worshipping diversity and inclusion is that no one is really allowed to be different. And some supervening authority, the University or the State, strengthens diversity by forcing everyone to be considered the same.

Despite my great respect for the Christian religion, one of my complaints about it is the large streak of moral perfectionism in it. Especially as this image of perfection clashes with the nature of the masculine soul. Despite the wisdom in Aquinas' dictum that grace does not erase nature but brings it to perfection, the practice of the Faith on the ground and in less capable hands has often felt just like erasure.

There is a greatly different message in a civilization that tries to mold and shape the natural male soul because it values it and one which seems mostly to want to quash it. At best, in the second case, you get confusingly mixed messages. What you hear in church seems unrelated to what you discover on the playground.

(In its pedagogically inept and conflicted way, it did some damage even in the hands of an all-male hierarchy and priesthood. In the hands of a female and feminist clergy, the harm to men would rise to the level of psychological gendercide.)

Perhaps because of that history, I have long been deeply suspicious of idealism, especially the kind which purports to describe what is but is essentially describing what ought to be, at least in the mind of believer. Liberalism, as I have noted, is awash in this kind of lying.

Jack Donovan's realistic new work on The Way of Men, in one sense validates all the nightmare fears of feminists about the male. He paints a picture of the masculine soul based firmly in the image and dynamics of the gang. The work of a gang --a relatively small hierarchically bonded group of males-- is to stake out turf for us, against them, and to guard the perimeter and exercise control over territory. This means power exercised against and over (and for) nature, women, and other men. Violence and competition is inherent in the blueprint. And the needed masculine qualities are strength, courage, competence and honor. Patriarchy, as Mother Nature intended it. While ideologues seek to pre-empt nature by describing what a good man is, aka what they want him to be, Donovan observes nature and first describes men who are good at being men, rightly saving the issue of how to make them good men for later.

The paradox of men is that they create civilization and culture, but they can also become its victims.

A science article. I like to read those because they are very much in tune with my Lenten resolution. They often inspire awe. But they can be unintentionally funny.

Like those breathless and edgy Science Channel apocalyptics, where the Sun finally engulfs the earth...5 billion years from now.

Apparently there are tons of earth-like planets in the galaxy after all, some of which are only about 30 light years away. One light year is 5,865,696,000,000 miles. About 6 quadrillion miles, then times 30. That's a number even larger than Obama's debt. So I guess it's sorta moot for now.

And that may be a good thing. Even though (or perhaps because) I am an intellectual of sorts --someone who has made his living by talking-- I never equate "intelligent" with "nice and friendly". Two entirely separable tracks. I love those folks who get all dewy eyed about us finally "not being alone in the universe." They might consider the Aztecs --or the Incas, or any of the North American Indian tribes. I wonder if any of their priest-astronomers longed to find intelligent life far across the Great Sea...

Ooops.

One of my favorite films is Tim Burton's 1996 Mars Attacks! Aside from the admittedly ignoble pleasure of seeing Sarah Jessica Parker's head on the body of a small dog, (typecasting), it is not only goofily and sharply funny with a terrific cast, but the paranoid Strangelove general turns out to be correct, all the pacifists and idealists get squashed, and the world is finally saved by White Trailer Trash love of country music. Even with Glenn Close's parody of Nancy Reagan, it's a right-winger's dream :)

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

and these are problem-and-conflict generating characters, in fiction, but the invasive, busybody, controlling, hectoring, no boundaries, know-it-all, it's-for-your-own-good and nothing-is-my-fault female...Gawd.

Utter self-absorption combined with complete lack of self-knowledge, much less any sense of limit, flaw, or ambiguity. And no learning from experience unless the pushback is violent, in which case she becomes The Victim.

Reminds me of As Good As It Gets. Breathless female fan to Jack Nicholson: How do you, as a man, write such amazingly real female characters? Nicholson: I write the character as a man, and then remove all reason and accountability.

It's no accident that both in the orthodox and the Gnostic tales of the Fall of the World, it is unbounded female curiosity at the bottom of it.

It is not a fact of nature but a set of deliberate choices that makes this one killing dominate the media because it serves the narrative which continues to shame Whites into acquiesing into granting more and more moral and political power to a group that is, quite frankly, grossly dysfunctional, while actively ignoring the decades-long facts that Blacks regularly kill other Blacks in astonishing numbers. Giving this incident center stage, like the Louis Gates affair, is sheer racial propaganda.

I remember the Black Muslims once wanted their own Black State. Well, they got it. It's called Detroit.

In the comments section after a review of Jack Donovan's new book, The Way of Men, two criticisms oddly joined.

A very traditional male misleadingly calls Donovan "a homosexual activist" and for this reason decides that the book cannot be worth anything.

Another guy considers Donovan's views to favor fascism. Of course, that is a slippery word. In some ways, I doubt Jack would object. But the guy then moves on to the SA, making a connection between that particular part of Nazi fascism and homosexuality. This is not an original point.

Well, it will be true that for a lot of conservative and traditionalist guys, male homosexuality will cut you off from the tribe of men, no appeal. (Oddly, in some really traditional societies, you often have a split here: only the bottom is excluded; a top's masculinity is not put in question.)

But the link between homosexuality and fascism --here, I think, a synonym for military rule--- is interesting. Most gays, despite their desire to end Dont Ask Dont Tell, have no use for the military, except perhaps as a sexual uniform fantasy. (Most gay men also don't want to marry and do not create relations stable enough to make a marriage, but they resent being excluded from the social and legal benefits of that club.) Because of our own generally rocky road to being men, it's easy to dismiss the men who epitomize what you are told you cannot be. And then there's the usual liberal and feminist hatred of guns and soldiers. (Although they have the typical shadow liberal tendency to fall in love with strong male leaders who rule by sheer force.)

But if a homosexual man likes both his sexuality and his sex, seeing himself not as a special Uranian creation but as a minority subset of the male tribe, it would not be surprising if, in reaction to the gay culture's promotion of pseudo-masculinity and effeminacy, he emphasized kinds of archetypal masculinity closer to Donovan's description of the primordial gang.

I note again the cultural split we are living through, played out in racial terms. Hip Hop culture is hugely pervaded by Black gangsta-thug values and styles. Donovan wittily quotes ms. ultra-pc bell hooks herself to the effect that “…gangsta culture is the essence of patriarchal masculinity.” It is only because young Whites support this gang-based racialized maleness that the industry thrives. As so often the case, Blacks are the carriers of the primitive, which often goes by the name of "cool". White men are expected to live by the castrating code of feminism, but Blacks are celebrated and hugely rewarded for their utter theatrical opposition to it. And White women who would bridle at being called a lady by a White man support Black ghetto trash singers who say bitch and ho as easily as breathing.

Under the cover of post-racial enlightenment, they get to worship in Blackland the very things they have so righteously condemned in Whiteland.

Times are hard. I have a lot weighing on my mind. Partly things I can't control, but mostly things derived from my limits and character flaws. But today B has planned an outing in honor of my recent birthday. I plan to laugh a lot.

Update next day: it was a typical medley of B events, from a trip to an art museum to a couple of games at the bowling alley. And I did laugh a lot. Grateful for that. He remains the most likeable fella I know.

Monday, March 26, 2012

One of the most common argumentative fallacies is called ad hominem, where you attack the speaker instead of his ideas. Being subjected to that format countless times, Jack Donovan speaks clearly in his new book's preface, that this is a set of ideas, not a description of himself.

One of the typical flaws of the young is to identify themselves with their ideals. For example, if they value honesty, they imagine that they are honest. Any honest older person can tell you that having a value and living it are two different things. Youngsters are typically sensitive to hypocrisy, so that if you hold a value and do not live it to their expectation, you, your value or both might find themselves in the ashcan.

But few priests are saints, few therapists paragons of mental health, etc. If we were bound to speak only of what we had mastered, there'd be a lot less talking and writing. Some say that might be a good thing. But I recall attending an idiosyncratic Episcopal church in SF for a couple of years. The policy there for preachers (and for the laypeople who always joined in for followup comments) was to stick to your experience, to make your voice authentic. After several months, you begin to realize that the message was being limited by the speaker's life history and attitudes. It always is, of course, but the worshipping of experience brought about a shrunken worldview. Way too much of what was preached there had its roots in hearing yet again about the pastor's divorce.

My interest in male identity, manhood, etc. is not a declaration that I am a paragon or even a good example. This is not false humility. This is reality. Some parts of the masculine I am pretty good at, others not so much, or worse. Naming failure to measure up for what it is, that's part of being a man, I think. The anti-masculine fog in which we live wants to believe that everyone is a winner and a superstar. Which is patent BS. Like therapy, curiosity should aim at as much of the truth as you can stand.

Jack Donovan, author of Androphilia, and, with Nathan Miller, Blood-Brotherhood, has a new book out today, The Way of Men, which I have started reading through on Kindle. Never hesitant to provoke, this is the cover he chose:

He situates the distinctly masculine virtues within the gang as the male identity-creating and martial social unit. Although he does not use the Jungian language, he is a naturally archetypal thinker, trying to get down to biological basics, species blueprints and the first principles underlying culture and morality. Any work on "re-defined" masculinity that caters to feminist sensibilities --aka, hatred of the masculine in males-- is dismissed for the delusional claptrap it usually is.

In his preface, he says that he offers the book "without ego." This
means that it is not about his own manliness or that of any of his
affiliations. A good point. The anxiety that the subject provokes
usually leads to ad hominems and cheap psychologizing from the myriad egalitarian followers of Lewis Carroll's Dodobird. Donovan offers a
point of view that should stand or fall on its own powers of
description and explanation.

To the original three elements of manhood --strength, courage and mastery-- he adds honor and unfolds each virtue in what he imagines is its original form, virtue coming from the Latin virtus, from the Latin vir, man. In his social approach, what makes honor crucial is that manhood is constituted by how a male is assessed by other men in the honor group hierarchy. Men are made and recognized to be so by and with (and against) one another, and only resultantly in the eyes of women. Women value men whom other men value.

An important and highly useful distinction he makes, elegantly and clarifyingly, is the difference between being a good man and being good at being a man. It is the second phrase which is actually primary and it is this that describes manliness, prior to the complexities of culture and ethics.

So far, very good. And written in a forthright style that well fits his message.

HT to my FB friend Leah for a link to this story
about the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and the increasing number of
European Jews --most of whom live in France and the UK-- fleeing to
Israel. To the ancient and native unease with the people of Israel in
their midst is now added the absolutely unapologetic passions of the
growing Islamic umma. Although he was a "French national", I doubt very much whether Mohammed Merah felt himself to be anything other than a Muslim.

The telling remark is here:

To quote psychiatrist
Zvi Rex: “Europe will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” Europe
doesn’t want to live under the psychological burden of Auschwitz
forever. The Jews are living reminders of the moral failure of Europe.
This leads to the projection of guilt on Israel and the remaining
European Jews.

“Europe will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”
Ironic, but true, I think. And not just the simple awful facts of the
Nazi-organized attempt to exterminate them, but the way that event was
mythologized afterwards. By mythologized I do not mean fabricated, but
given a particular role in the shaping of a transcendent
meaning-creating story.

The standard mythology of
World War II situates Hitler and the Nazis as the absolute culmination
of evil in human history. And not just because of the savage intra-European war, but because of the asserted centrality within it of the Final Solution. With typically Eurocentric bias and a cosmic
case of negative inflation, modern Europe branded itself with the mark
of Cain, an ineradicable and unforgivable sense of shame centered on the
image of Auschwitz and even sanctified with its own special sacred Old
Testament title, The Holocaust.

Although Jewish theological, philosophical and political
responses to the events of the war varied, in the standard narrative
taken up by most of the post-war Europeans, the Holocaust exhausted any
Euro claim to moral authority and required civilizational repentance.
But since it was an unforgiveable crime, no amount of expiation could
atone for it. It meant constitutional and unending shame for the
Gentiles and by its magnitude disallowed any conscious thought of how
the Jews themselves might have had any role in it besides morally
innocent victims.

The liberal civilizational mythology
grants to any group or individual who gains victim status absolute moral
authority and freedom from blame or responsibility. All its victims are purely innocent. And to the oppressor group it grants no escape from complete moral
responsibility, passed on from generation to generation. So who would be surprised if, after a time, the cause
of your shame --whom you resented to begin with--becomes the renewed
object of your hatred?

An Elie Wiesel might, on first
dolorous hearing, prove moving and humbling. But after decades of
listening to him, how many would have admitted to the predictable desire
to make him shut up? Just as one ought to careful never to be so
benevolent and charitable that the recipient feels always indebted and
eventually resentful of you, so it is with wrongdoing. Make the
perpetrator sufficiently ashamed and he will one day come to wish he had
finished the job.

Furthermore, since Europe only
accelerated its shedding of its Christian faith after the war, there was
no God to forgive or to temper the magnitude of human failing by
reminding us that we are neither the origin nor the end of history. The
sense of Providence which allowed Europeans to cope with a chaotic world
was erased, by them, at the very moment when they needed it most. And
the events which provoked the deepest hunger for a path to forgiveness
were the very ones which wiped it out.

(My impression
is that the more "advanced" the European group, the more affected they
have been by this event. The Germanic peoples and the French seem far
more vulnerable to this highminded wound than the peoples of the South
or the East.)

Even on an individual basis, in therapy,
psychological interpretations are more art than science. So on a large
cultural and historical basis, they are even riskier. But I wonder if
Europe's bizarre, truly bizarre, importation of tens of millions of
deeply alien Muslims over the last fifty years has been partly fueled by
a double unconscious drive: to commit suicide in atonement for their guilt and at the same time to wreak vengeance on the people who have come
to symbolize it.

I have always liked the vampire character. That may be diagnostic, but for the moment we'll leave that to me and my therapist. When I was a priest and trying to deal with my "disordered" sexual desires, I found the image of the vampire oddly comforting. A fellowship, perhaps, between the closet and the coffin. I even wrote an essay about The Shaman and the Vampire which, several decades later, I am hesitant to find and read. But the gist of it was that from the daylight world, the vampire was easily read as a curse. Within the nocturnal world, however, it was possible to see him as the carrier of shadowy truths which diurnal minds could not allow themselves to admit.

I was (am?) a man who would prefer to earn his salvation by performance rather than receive it as a gift. And was, and am still, a man who believes in keeping certain kinds of rules. Not out of a passion for righteousness, but from love of order. That insoluble chink in my armor, the vulnerable spot in my heel, tended to soften me a bit, slow me down just a little, open me now and again to the possibility of grace and compassion. In some ways it made me a better pastor than I would otherwise have been.

Pope Benedict has described the presence of gays in the priesthood as a hardship for the Church. Well, as a group, we both did a lot of good and a lot of damage. But then, which group doesn't? (That's not evidence for an argument, just an observation.) Aside from the pros or cons of a particular gay man, when the priesthood either becomes or is perceived to be gay-dominated, for most men that translates as a further feminization of an already problematically feminine Christian ethos.

Which makes me think of the Jesuits.

Watching a documentary on Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits --looking for the yet undiscovered reason to understand their attraction-- the narrator described the pre-conversion Ignatius as typical of the upper class men of 16th century Spain: passionately Catholic and very religious, but not inclined to translate that into what Christian morality usually calls for: forgiveness, forbearance, limitation. To my ear, this sounded like the natural clash of Christianity and classical manhood. The Mediterranean world has often been very tolerant of this dissonance. And when Ignatius took his masculine drives into religion, he created an order of men with a kind of military structure and spirit who sublimated male aggression into aggressive action on behalf of the Roman Church.

The older religious orders were typically open both to men and women. Separate branches of a tree. All the Benedictine monastic groups, the regular canons, and the medieval mendicants like the Franciscans and Dominicans, both friars and nuns. (The Franciscans carried a noticeable feminine energy: the primacy of affect. Dominicans, on the other hand, were devoted to the Apollonian worlds of philosophy and theology.) But there were never any groups of Jesuettes. And even though their masculine energy has been muted by the general cultural mess of our time and their foolish romance with "social justice", they remain to this day an all-male (and hugely sacerdotal) enterprise.

I wonder if any of the liberal Jesuits who favor ordaining women have pondered how unrecognizable their order would become if they opened their own Company of Jesus to female members...

Semi-free association. Started out with vampires, and look where I end up. The mind is a labyrinth.

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Kenneth Minogue's 1963 classic The Liberal Mind. He's particularly good at excavating the assumptions built into Western culture over the last centuries which makes it hard not to be a liberal, even if you think you're a conservative. What we see all around us today, as the air we breathe, he laid
out clearly a half century ago. Ideas do indeed have consequences. Enormous and world-changing
consequences. My sense of liberalism as a cultural trance or as a spell cast
over the mind.

Much
of the strength of liberalism as an ideology results from the manner in which
ittakes
over ordinary words and gently inflates them into metaphysical tenets…Thelogic
of this ideological operation can perhaps best be seen if we turn from “desire”(which we assumed to be the key term of liberalism in its earlier
development) to itspartner, “need.”

Needs-conceptions
have, for many people, a vise-like grip which nothing will shake. Each attack
on the conception of needs will be met by a baffled reformulation: Surely
it is obvious that people do have certain fundamental needs if they are to
live. And each reformulation will miss the point. There is no factual issue at
stake, but the semantic issue has large philosophical implications.

"Needs" is a language which has grown out of the liberal
movement (and some associated movements) and it has, like all languages,
its particular blind spots, the things which it cannot say. Once inside, no
matter how much we thresh about, we shall be hard put to it to escape. A great
mistake has been to imagine that an ideology consists of a set of answers to
neutral questions; whereas in fact it consists in the questions.

What we take for granted is a mix of nature and culture. Liberalism has taught
us how to think and feel and behave, all of us. Reminds me both of the structure and dynamics of character (and character disorder), of culture itself, and of the axis of
theological method that Macquarrie used: Fragestellung
and Begrifflichkeit…Question Framing and Concept Formation…Which questions you ask and what kind of answers
you have at hand.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

I googled to find the latest on the jihadi murders in Toulouse. These were the headlines.

Struggle to understand? What?

And then our journalistic betters at WaPo and the Guardian of the Left lament the boost this will give to the "right". Those Frenchmen who may wonder what the hell all those African Muslims are doing all over their country?

Watching Being Human, a series about a household composed of a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost, trying for a "normal" life. Former people acting badly under
stress. Josh the werewolf is endlessly apologetic and
intermittently selfrighteous. Sally the ghost is needily self-absorbed and
mommily invasive and controlling (and intermittently self-righteous). Aidan the
vampire. Here I confess my bias. Sam Witwer is very watchable.

He is handsome in a
really unusual way. George Maharis, with a bit of James Dean, Harrison Ford. A
strong masculine hero, expressive, ethical, conflicted and soulful, but without losing his balls…ok, I admit it. Hot. Made in Canada, the series credits are full of French names,
with the appropriate accents, gráve, ègu and circûmflex. A flashback. Years ago in the
Toronto gay community, there was a tempest in the newspaper about the racist
cultural imperialism and hegemony of English-speaking reporters writing about Montreal
and Quebec without maintaining the proper French accents…Really. Montréal,
Québec. And when we pronounced those cities' names in the English style (Muhntree-all , Kwebbeck) did we obliterate the people's culture and assert our dominance? Along with issues of whether it was ok to advertize for sex partners
and excluding Blacks, or fat or effeminate guys, etc. I will never forget the dark, obsessive, cramped,
soulless moralism.

(These people would have nothing but contempt for the dark, obsessive, cramped moralism of the Scots Presbyterians who dominated Ontario, but they are their secular children.)

In a deeply conservative world, my problem would
be my sexuality. In a deeply liberal world, my problem is my sex, my race, my
nationality and my opinions. As the angry dyke I worked with on the AIDS front
in Toronto once told me: You’re white,
you’re male, you’re educated, you’re Catholic. If you weren’t queer I wouldn’t
give you the time of day. The Progressive Heart revealed.

As jpnill put it so well, “Has there ever been another civilization that marched
itself off a cliff based solely on the question, ‘Well, who’s to say?’ ”

With the coming of Spring, the weekly Farmer's Market sets up shop on Wednesdays in the neighborhood. I mostly look and rarely buy, but it's nice. One of those Things White People Like.

Should I include my unseasonable reaction to the recent Florida shooting that the media and the government have decided are newsworthy? "Latino guy with White name shoots Black guy with stupid madeup name." (Funny how Black perps' race is irrelevant but Black victims' race is paramount if the perp is asssumed to be White...but here is Latino). Since the Florida police can find no law broken, evidence being thin, Eric My People Holder's DOJ has taken an interest. The spate of Black mob on White violence this past while however he has not found interesting. To say nothing of the practically ancient disproportionate Black on White crime and violence that characterizes this "nation of cowards".

The Muslim "French national" Mohammed Somethingorother who shot up Jewish school children in Toulouse will have his crime memorialized in a joint march featuring both Jews and Muslims. Can you imagine the opposite? Muslims marching in sad solidarity with Jews if the shooter had been Hebrew and his victims Mohammedans? Sure you could.

As I say, White people, Jews included here, are the most foolish race on the planet, able to act out of idealism when reality is shooting them in the face.

I am impressed very much with de Tocqueville's outline of how a democracy can reduce its people to slavery through equality, that “depraved taste for equality, which impels the
weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men
to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom."

His three paths seem really astonishingly prescient but I suspect were based on historical study.

1. Guarantee that individual parasitism would not affect the status and privileges of equal citizenship.

2. Maintain that elected officials and a vast administrative state are capable of gradually perfecting life through proper regulation.

3. Erode the life of communities, so that people see themselves only as inwardly-focussed individuals, intent on following their recreations and pleasures.

Archbishop Rowan Williams, of Canterbury, will end his term on St Augustine's throne this year. It is easy to criticize him, and he deserves it, but the deeper problem is his Church. No one man can fix that.

Since its birth as the CofE in the Reformation, it has been a creature of the State and both propped up and hemmed in by that fact. It never really was a single Church, but rather a celebration of inclusion and diversity, that is, a muddle. Puritans, High Churchmen and Liberals all corralled...or sheepherded...together on one ecclesiastical island, a churchly version of the United Kingdom, with its ordained civil servants. But His Grace, I think, did little to help, even if he could. That nation and its church have been falling apart together for over a half century.

Like many contemporary clerics, he seemed to think that his theological status qualified him to pontificate (from the Latin, "to bloviate like a bishop") on political matters, in detail, in "bold statements that needed immediate corrections that themselves then needed further corrections." Where he was not predictable he was disastrous. In his mixed review, John O'Sullivan notes:

Following the 2008
financial crisis, he declared somewhat wildly: “Every transaction in the
developed economies of the West can be interpreted as an act of
aggression against the economic losers in the worldwide game.” As
Wilmoore Kendall remarked of a similarly rash statement (from Senator
Barry Goldwater, as it happens): “There’s nothing wrong with that remark
that couldn’t be put right by 100,000 well-chosen words.”

But as the late T. E. Utley, a distinguished Anglican journalist of an
earlier generation, pointed out: “Christianity does not tell us what
answers to give in politics; it tells us what questions to ask.” With
certain obvious exceptions, the faithful may give a range of political
answers to them. Their answers should rightly combine the moral
arguments implicit in the questions with practical considerations
resting on non-religious authority. Thus the pope may ask how best to
help the poor; but Milton Friedman is better equipped to prescribe the
method.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Netflix allows me, in one evening, to watch male Southern belle Leslie Jordan’s one man autobiographical show My Trip Down the Pink Carpet –occasionally quite funny and much focused on the gender style issue—and a post-Apocalyptic drama based on the fundamentalist Christian Rapture myth, The Moment After II: The Awakening. Two moments of American culture in century 21. Same planet, different worlds.

The celebration of gayness was pretty much all White. The evil fundamentalist movie very racially mixed. Did someone forget to follow the script?

Mr Leslie opined that there are only two types of homosexuals, the fabulous ones who know who they are, and are out-and-proud and, well, fabulous, and the fearful ones who are afraid someone will find out. Well, Ex Cathedra is not afraid and he's not fabulous...so maybe he's nebulous.

Among the amusing show biz tales*, the autobiographical moments, a very funny limerick that had to do with dynamite, American geography and body parts, were his comments on being a sissy and how that affected his sense of himself as a man and his relationships to other men. His ambiguity about his gender marbled his life story.

He has been immersed in the gay culture since he was a teenager. At one point he described his inner self as a (female) teenaged cheerleader and at another expressed disdain for teenage cheerleaders. He made it clear that he spent most of his life in terror of heterosexual men and admitted his attraction to them. After ending three decades or more of substance abuse and discovering his self-hatred alive and well, he was sent by his sponsor to a straight men's recovery group. Long story short, his terror transmuted into a sense of acceptance of himself as a man, as he found the men there shared, in their own way, his fear and shame, and he developed with them a code for living.

Sometimes the circular pattern of maturity typical of gay men, the unusual internal relationship of masculine and feminine, is more like a rollercoaster.

*The best, I think: supporting role in a police drama where he was to be knocked down and then straddled and questioned on the ground by Mark Harmon. Jordan kept forgetting his lines --dazzled by Mr Harmon at close range-- and forcing retakes. After the third take, before Jordan fell, Harmon whispered in his ear, "I know what you're doing." Exposed, he remembered his lines.

de Tocqueville, back in his early 19th century study of the American experiment

contrasted the “manly and lawful passion for equality” that
enables citizens to strive for greatness with a very different and all
too human quality: “the depraved taste for equality, which impels the
weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men
to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom."

Tocqueville sensed that the old tyranny could emerge from a modern
democracy in three ways: in the guarantee that the privileges and status
of equal citizenship endure regardless of the individual’s parasitism;
in the notion that elected officials and “a vast, neutral administrative
state” are capable of gradually perfecting life and ensuring its proper
regulation; and in the incremental erosion of community life as
individuals, “incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry
pleasures with which they glut their lives,” turn inward.

Andrew McCarthy's review of Mark Levin's Ameritopia, in the New Criterion.

My father always said that the more moving parts a tool had, the likelier it was to break down.

My current monitor display. Great keyboard but now the visuals suck.

PS. Interesting. I am having a few moments of video normality and now the images I placed here, which I took using the Snipping Tool, are perfectely clear as well. When I took them, they were discolored and fuzzy.

Which means that the computer is producing correct images but the screen is distorting them...hmmm.

In My Beautiful Launderette, one of the heroes has a father who is an Indian socialist journalist living in England. He laments at one point that by their failure to support his idea of a just society "the working classes have been an enormous disappointment to me." I feel similarly about the Jungians. When it comes to social and political applications of Jung.

Found an old paper on Basic
Jung by a contemporary Jungian of some note. Just fine until the liberal
prejudice bleeds into it. He dismisses Jung’s comments about Aryan vs Jewish
psychology as “stupid” and appearing to support “racial discrimination”. (Jung was no social egalitarian.) Then
the usual examples of shadow projection: Bush’s “axis of evil” and Reagan’s
“evil empire”. The completely unself-critical and approved bien-pensant point of view.

When the liberal elite kowtow to all the pieties of multiculturalism, including
the special and unique psychological gifts of the oppressed people of color
groups and their sacred "cultures", and assume that racism, sexism, homophobia and capitalism are great
evils prima facie, it’s hard not to
feel disgust at the self-serving hypocrisy. The sheer lack of thought or real curiosity. And while pretending to special
knowledge and sensitivity, the opinions are simply collective attitudes, window dressing courtesy of a Swiss psychiatrist's lexicon.

Having served my time in the PC world of AIDS services, I am familiar with the Progressive Left and their points of view, especially on race and gender and class. With a little bit of transgressive pleasure, I have been visiting the land of the Traditionalist Right. These folks are not conservatives. Just as I say I am not a Republican, but a conservative, because Republicans are accomodationist pussies, the Traditionalist Right says the same of conservatives. Start with Pat Buchanan, a paleo-conservative, and keep turning Right.

This curiosity led me to watch DW Griffith's oft mentioned but, I suspect, rarely seen Birth of a Nation.

I have heard of The
Birth of A Nation mentioned often in the history of film, and always with
the descriptor “racist”. Three long hours of silent filming. A history
of the Civil War and Reconstruction from a decidedly Southern point of view, dramatizing
the birth of the Klan as heroes . Not something you run across every day! I
realize I know relatively little about Reconstruction, but group vengeance is hardly a
novelty in history. As I have realized, Southern Whites had precious little
reason to embrace as equals a racial group they had always known as inferiors, and
after the chaos of Reconstruction and unsurprising combination of revenge,
incompetence and corruption Blacks exhibited, even less. It makes the Jim Crow
regime intelligible.

DW Griffith’s other movie, Intolerance. Four interlocking historical moments of intolerance:
contemporary (1916) America, post Reformation France, ancient Jerusalem,
ancient Babylon.The “intolerance” of the US shows up in the female proponents
of Moral Uplift who recruit the spinster sister of an industrialist. To raise
more funds for the project, she gets her brother to cut wages and divert the
savings to the Cause. In one frame, the workers complain They take our money away so they can use it to reform us and make
themselves look good. Funny how history repeats. Progressives, puritans,
same breed.

A friend recently had a houseguest, an old pal who has
exacerbated a host of health problems by becoming grossly obese. Taking a set
of native flaws and adding to them by their own choice and behaviors. My friend
reflected that everyone really has their own “200 pound belly”, though often
not so obvious. Sadly true. Reminds me that, with very few exception, it’s the rare
misfortune of mine that I have not been the author of.

Ethos anthropo daimon, said Heraclitus. A man's character is his fate.

****

Without my laptop, I was forced to read an actual book. What was for most of my life a compulsive practice is now a rarity. I still read compulsively, but on a screen, not on paper.

I
re-opened The Closing of the American
Mind by Allan Bloom, 1987. A homosexual man with a deep knowledge and love
of Western civilization, Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein.
He can think and he can write. He shows how deeply relativism, in the paradoxical service of an absolutist and dogmatic political agenda, has become the default mind of American youth. The very same people who will clock you for being judgmental or Eurocentric will nail you to the wall for any slight against the code of racial or gender orthodoxy.

One of his many bull’s eyes pointed out the difference between the
socialization of men in classical education and the current post-60’s
liberalism.

The traditional order accepted the human and masculine passions of ambition for
glory and rule as natural and tried to train and order them; the current Boomer
regime of feminist “histrionic moralism” requires the demonization, repression
and extinction of these natural drives. At least in men.

And he shows the untrained and denied power drive hidden underneath the egalitarian rhetoric. Good
stuff.

My idol, Shawn Spencer on Psych, supports one of my suspicions about heterosexuality. He
recommends his partner Gus as a datable guy to a female client: He’s perfect. Single, has a job, and is
willing to change everything about himself for a girl.

*****

Inspector Lynley
Mysteries. Once again the class resentment of his colleague is so
repetitive and predictable. She is one bitter bitch*. Were she in charge of the
world, the gulag would always be full.

No subaltern group wants equality, regardless of what they
say. At the moment of saying it, most of them may even believe it. But
eventually they will want privilege and revenge and dominance. Equality in
nature is an exceeding rare and delicate, even unnatural, balance. If achieved,
it lasts briefly and soon settles into unequal hierarchy, the natural state of
nature.

So I guess all slopes are slippery.

(*At least she seems to know it. When Lynley threatens to quit the force at one point, she says she'd quit, too. When he asks why, she says, " 'Cause no one else would work with me." )

*****

Thinking again about what an impregnable moral position is
gained by adopting the progressive stance of group egalitarianism and
individual libertarianism. You are in favor of everyone being happy and having
what they want. Who could say a word against you?

It is a character flaw in American culture now that
wildly wealthy celebrities can espouse piously highminded populist sentiments above
–like the pathetic OWS sharade—and be acclaimed as allies of The People, when
the wildly wealthy businessmen who create the industries that the celebrities
live and thrive in are demonized and scapegoated.

Today is the vernal equinox. Although SF had its equal day and night on the 16th. Always has to be special.

I am lucky to live in a place with such a mild climate that the differences between the seasons are not nearly as dramatic as they are, say, back East or up North. The lemontree in the backyard is full already. The dumb spider who set up her nest on the backdoor lamp where the wasps used to live has managed to survive the winter. And although we've had more rain and chill lately, it's not relentless.

One of my fears is that when I am older and my health inevitably starts to fade, I will be forced to move back to New York near my family. The family is not the problem, but the weather. And I would miss the West.

Monday, March 19, 2012

The keyboard works. But now the colors are doing their shake and shimmer distortion dance. So my laptop is back...and not quite. I'll give it a chance overnight to heal itself, like last time.

Not having internet access or email has helped me honor my Lenten desire to avoid news that brings out my dark side. Not entirely however..the net is the occasion, not the cause. The cause is the world. Or me.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

One of the other criteria for things I am trying to give up for Lent, along with what causes aneurism or provokes murderous fantasies, are items that make me sympathetic to secession. Such as items which include the word Michelle.

When liberals get fed up, as when GWB was elected, they often fantasize about leaving America for Canada or Europe. US conservatives have nowhere to go. So they fantasize about secession.

Some days I understand why.

PS I used the virtual keyboard in the Windows disabled access package to type this.

I plowed through his two books on Gnosticism several years ago. And I mean plowed through. A brilliant guy, but a with the style of an OCD paranoid lawyer. He illuminated the Gnostic mind and project uniquely well, with his outline of the Valentinian narrative grammar*. But he held to the orthodox faith and charged Gnostics with, among other things, trespassing the bounds of the human condition. Fair enough, a Gnostic would plead guilty.

But O'Regan's sense of the limits of man rings true: our grasp of the world, while real, is limited; we find our small selves within an unimaginably large universe not of our making; and our track record for behaving well is dismal indeed. So a little humility is called for, says O'R.

What is true of the race is true of the individual. Yes, even of the Gnostic sympathizer, Ex Cathedra.

I never liked Lent, the 40-day fasting liturgical season before Easter that we are now in. I guess part of it was living in meterological climes back East and North, where the weather was already depressing enough without a season of self-flagellation laid on top of it.

Purple-covered images in the later stages of Lent

Nowadays, with my minimal and nominal practice of it, if I think of it as going into short-term therapy, it's not so bad. Especially with the mild San Francisco winters, which are really more like East Coast autumns, but with greenery all around.

__________________________

*For those of you with the interest and stomach for it, this clip from my Amazon review:

The familiar orthodox narrative is of a self-sufficient but
communitarian Deity (Father, Son and Spirit) who creates a variegated
universe out of love and whose special human creation freely turns on
this love to choose willful selfishness; the divine Son becomes incarnate,
and by his obedience and sacrificial death restores the possibility of
original communion, through the community of the Church and with the
communitarian Deity.

The Valentinian narrative describes a
self-sufficient communitarian divine world of many variegated
characters, where one of them likewise chooses wilfulness for the sake
of knowledge and thus falls from this communion into a space of
alienation and ignorance, indirectly creating the universe of matter and
psyche and entrapping parts of his/herself therein. An envoy from the
divine world enters this universe to awaken the entrapped and fragmented
divinities caught therein (humans) and this self-knowledge restores
them to their original home.

In the orthodox narrative, God becomes man
out of love, so that men might become gods by grace. In the Gnostic
narrative, God becomes man out of need, so that men might remember by
grace that they are gods by nature. Salvation by grace, faith and works
vs salvation by nature, knowledge and identity.

O'Regan sees this
second narrative, using characters and material from the Bible, as a
parasitic deformation, a spiritual pathology, where the proper estate of
man as an ontologically inferior, morally weak and epistemically
challenged creature is overblown into a self-aggrandizement based on
special knowledge of the divine causes of the state of the universe.

Five shrinking orders of Dominican sisters, aka EcoFeminist Democrats, are dressing up their need to pool their aging resources with the verbiage of "Committed Collaboration". The girls are really good at this kind of talk, as I have noted before. They live in a linguistic bubble of bloviation where ordinary English seems a dream. Electing one of them as prioress of their Leadership Team --they love that-- they parenthetically explained that prioress means "first among equals". Uh, no. Prioress, like Prior, means simply First. The girls, good feminists, are terrified of power-over.

This team gave shape and form to a process for committed collaboration.
They identified groups already in collaboration, shared calendars of
congregational events, nurtured the relationships that had been
developing among sisters and associates by arranging gatherings,
launched a grant application process for collaborative pilot projects,
and initiated a search for a Promoter of Collaboration for the five
congregations.

Ah, giving shape, identifying, sharing, nurturing, launching, initiating...They must have read How To Beef Up Your Resume and Mission Statement.

They found their Promoter and installed her:

The day began in the new office at the motherhouse, with the
sisters standing together and blessing the five directions, and gifting
Mary Ellen with congregational logos to decorate the new office.

In case you think that there are four directions, you silly Eurocentrist, China has five. These girls are as multicultural as Jesus was. (Oh, wait. Unless they approached him, he never worked with Gentiles. And only had male apostles. Sorry.)

Aaaand, since Kate Winslett got a Golden Globe for Mildred Pierce and part of the film was shot in that very office, --how cool-- Mary Ellen, Golden Among Equals, got her own little prize. Now that is what I call "sanctifying the culture."

Of course these Speak Truth To Power gals neglect to mention that they are forced into doing this because they are getting old, no one is joining and their numbers and resources are dwindling. That would be too plain and simple to admit. It's all dressed up as a New Initiative.

I look forward to their Committed Collaboration Cemetery Conference in a few years: "As a committed sign of unity in collaborative mission, all the Sisters will now be launched into burial in nurturing Mother Gaia at single and holistic cemetery site, which also serves as part of our Sustainable Living Earth Center for eco-justice and anti-racist knitting initiatives. The Passed-On Sisters look forward to diverse and inclusive ministries in the Next World, supporting the Damned in their efforts for peace and justice against the oppression of the Male-Supremacist God."

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Sentimentality was cynicism’s other side. Both attitudes dehumanize people by
turning them into caricatures, but whereas the caricatures of the cynic generate hatred
and contempt, the caricatures of the sentimentalist provoke tears. Both attributes are
equally distant from the real world, and both are corruptly self-conscious. The cynic is
proud of his acumen in not being taken in by the world, while the sentimentalist
regards his tears as proof of a compassionate sensibility. Put the two attitudes together
and you have melodrama: quite a distance from reality, indeed, but better perhaps
than either attitude by itself. The politics of the liberal mind is a melodrama of
oppressors and victims.

...

Today, the successors of those generous souls who agitatedfor giving money to the Third World are agitating for the “forgiveness” of theresulting debts that now hang heavily around the necks of the peoples of thosecountries. This is a campaign which suggests one more possible definition of theliberal mind—as a boundless enthusiasm for spending other people’s money.

But the logical point comes back to the basic unreality of the liberal mind: namely, a refusal to think in terms of real human beings. Instead, the generic man of liberal thought is like a window dresser’s dummy—merely a vehicle for provoking hatred or tears.As the liberal mind has diffused itself through modern society, our understanding ofreal people engaged in real politics has weakened. Whole classes of people have beenlost to an image of martyrdom.

The liberalism that I mention here, with its synonym adjective progressive, means the following:

Under the overriding rubric ofequality for all,
a value that is deemed beyond criticism,
Liberalism's goal
is to constantly increase
the status, the wealth and the power
of specially designated subjacent groups
--to be named as victims--at the expense ofandto the detriment of
the status, the wealth and the power
of specially designated successful groups
--to be named as oppressors.--

Liberalism's methods
are

the continual expansion

of the State's coercive power of regulation and taxation,

and the use of various forms of socio-cultural control:

news media, entertainment, education, language.

It is an egalitarian narrative of revenge-by-replacement, a punitive Manichean melodrama of victimization and oppression. The goal, while preached as equality and non-discrimination, is actually to replace one system of dominance with another. Liberalism is therefore revolutionary, but by increments in State power and cultural change.

While preaching open-mindedness and tolerance, it actually requires Borg-like dogmatism and total compliance, regardless of the claims of fact or outcome. It bears all the marks of a crypto-religious faith and can be usefully understood as a toxically degraded form of Western Christianity.

Liberalism's synonym is progressive because it is continuous and has no internal brake. Once a problem has been addressed, others will follow it. There are always new problems for the Liberal State and Culture to "solve."

All Liberal programs and agendas eventually require more State regulation and more taxation. It is their answer to everything. Even where the first step appears to be a removal of barriers or disliked laws, the second step is always a forest of supporting laws and regulations designed to protect whatever has just been "liberated."

Contemporary Liberalism is a form of zero-sum Gramscian cultural Marxism in that it aims for an expansionist dictatorship of seven interlocking "proletariats" consisting of racial, gender, economic, and ideological groups which will completely replace any traditionally successful or powerful (but always non-Liberal) groups.

The victim groups, because they are considered to be victims lacking power, have unlimited moral capital; the successful groups, because they are considered oppressors holding power, have no moral capital at all. Liberals thus have no defense against the desires of victims (codes as "needs" or "rights"), whatever they may be.

The currency and coin of the realm of Liberalism is perceived moral superiority. This is always the real desire.

Eg, in any conflict between Blacks and Whites, Blacks are always the morally righteous victims and the Whites the morally bankrupt oppressors. For example, the strong Leftist belief that Blacks can't be "racist", only Whites can.

The unprecedented bile directed against George W Bush can be explained by the fact that he embodied everything that this seven-fold ideology loathes.

Various subset ideologies and victim groups exist, of course, but I think they can usually be subsumed under one or more of these seven, the first three of which are the classics:

Race, Gender, Class.

LGBTism is a subset which combines feminist and multicultural themes, along with a hefty dose of secularism. The Animal Rights people are environmentalists: non-human nature comes first. ProPalestinian Israel-hatred is not about religion but about multiculturalism and transnationalism. Etc.

The most bizarre characteristic of liberalism, on the surface, is its supportive, exculpatory and admiring attitude toward Islam*, a religion characterized by divinely sanctioned violence, strong restrictions on women, primitive homophobia, autocracy and theocracy, and economic habits making for huge distinctions between the few rich and the many poor. But it is anti-Western (as is liberalism, "the ideology of Western suicide") and even though it is a religion, it is a Third World faith and so liberals have coded it as a Non-White race and so it has all the multicultural rights and privileges of People of Color. "Islamophobia" is almost always called "racist." Liberals live in constant vigilance against the spectre of a White Male American Christian Capitalist Police-State, a Republic of Gilead, while the Islamic Republic of Anywhere more than fits that bill, but is utterly ignored as any kind of threat.

*Now that I think of it, Hitler's Nazis and Stalin's Communists had a period of non-aggression and cooperation, too. So it's not unprecedented.

When I really started thinking about economics, I happened on the question: Who creates wealth? And I realized that I have never created any in my life. I move around --for services rendered-- the wealth that others create. Earning a living is not the same as creating the environment in which people can earn a living. It's sorta like the difference between having money and having cash in your pocket.

An anti-feminist blog I recently found has now gone private. But I have used Google's cache to find a way in. This set of blunt thoughts from the author about women and men, wealth and independence.

The feminist movement is a giant ponzi scheme, which never generates its
own wealth or culture, but constantly steals from others lower down.
The women at the top are either the lawyers, professors, and government
workers, or the biggest victims. Victimhood buys its own status. The
ones paying in are forced to - the men with alimony and child support
around their necks; and men who pay taxes.

The so-called liberation of women was built off of the backs of men. Without men, empowered females have nothing. Government cutbacks prove this. Women are the first to suffer
from government cutbacks, a line which seeks to show women as victims.
What it really shows is how men have for so long been forced to foot the
bill of female liberation. Men get to work the hot, uncomfortable or
dangerous jobs (or live in polluted Asia to avoid the minefield of
feminist culture) while women seek air conditioned comfort. All those HR
jobs are provided by men who are doing the real producing, in other
words.

The New York Times' Women Bearing the Brunt of Austerity in Britain* is one of those articles that says the above without meaning to say it. That women bear the brunt of austerity means that men bear the brunt of taxpaying and receive few government services in return. Men are sidelined.

Austerity measures will bring something of a better balance to society.
Take day care, for example. Why is the government doing the mother's
job? Why do women believe the feminist propaganda that women's work, in
the home, is inferior to being a banker or a professor? Let men do those
jobs so that women can stay at home and be proper mothers. The article
offers typical womanist victimology:

“It would just be like losing a right arm,” she said. “I’d have to drop
that one day a week, just to be able to be at home with Joshua,” her
2-year-old.

OMG lady, you mean you'd have to stay at home and be a mother? How outrageous! What a victim you are!

Incidentally, if women are so empowered, why do they become such
pathetic weakling victims the moment the government pulls the plug on a
program? Is it real empowerment if you're so utterly dependent on
something else? Isn't that more of a parent-child relationship? Aren't
women, so completely government dependent, simply being child-like?

The modern woman moans and groans when heavily-indebted and
heavily-taxing governments start to pull back from places to which they
never should have gone:

Manchester, where Ms. Bradshaw, her partner, Lee Mellor, and their
rambunctious blond boys live in a neighborhood of worn brown row houses,
announced last month it was shutting its day care centers, which serve
800 children.

Like many cities and institutions around Britain,
Manchester is searching for savings to close the gap created by the
national government’s withdrawal of £3.5 billion, or about $5.6 billion,
in support to localities this year, a drop of nearly 12 percent under
Prime Minister David Cameron’s tough austerity program. Billions of
pounds more are to vanish by 2015.

Mr. Cameron, a Conservative, has also lifted a requirement that the
municipal authorities fund and operate Sure Start children’s centers,
which offer services including prenatal checkups, breast-feeding support
and day care. Their creation was a flagship achievement of the Labour
government of the former prime minister Tony Blair; many strapped local
councils are now closing the centers or scaling them back.

Here we see Mr. Cameron being made out to be the bad guy, just like
daddy is bad when he says no to the children and their requests. People -
women above all - have defined their lives a little too closely to the
government, and have refused to become independent. This is part of the
lack of responsibility that has been drilled into women.

Manchester is broke. Britain is broke. The West is broke. Largely
because feminism wanted to build some false utopia, where women could
play cowgirl and empowered raunch bitch with no responsibility. In fact,
the party lasted a lot shorter than I would have predicted. Maybe this
is just a speed-bump on the road to greater skankiness.

The following words can only come out of a culture that is thoroughly
Marxist and thoroughly white knight, as, again without meaning to, it
shows just how spoiled women are:

As Britain shaves public services and benefits, advocates contend that
women bear more than their fair share of the pain.

“The idea that what we should be doing is rolling back the state, it has
really important implications for women,” said Professor Sue
Himmelweit, an economist and policy coordinator of the Women’s Budget
Group, an advocacy group. “Women lose particularly from public sector
cuts. First of all, they lose their jobs.”

Women account for two-thirds of employees in the public sector, where
the government’s budget monitor says 710,000 jobs are to disappear. They
rely more heavily than men on public services and financial assistance
and are expected to lose 70 percent of the £18 billion being cut from
benefits like housing support and tax credits for the working poor, says
the Fawcett Society, a group pushing for greater gender equality.

Because they are poorer and live longer than men, women will be
disproportionately affected by reductions in services to the elderly.

The last bit, whining about women's longer lives, is a Hillary
Clinton-type comment ("The greatest sufferers of war are the women
because they lose their men.") Rather than looking at the gigantic
elephant in the room called Men live fewer years than women, those with an opinion just spin women live longer than men into the old entitlement machine. Women are victims because they live longer than men. Their longer lives entitle them to more money - from men through the state.

And further up in the block quote, it is noted that women "bear more
than their fair share of the pain." Isn't that because women have all
along been receiving more than fair ? Isn't it because feminists have
used the government to entitle women off of the backs and hard work of
men? Isn't it a bit of justice that women should suffer cutbacks? This is the sort of princess thinking that is destroying our society. Daddy
always gives me a new car for my birthday. Poor me. This year, I get a
miserable new bicycle and a Louis Vuitton. I hate daddy!

But despite all that foot-stomping and temper-tantrumming, the following words from the article really take the cake:

“I’m not going to be as independent when I’m older,” she said. “It’s
almost like we’re going back, women are becoming more dependent on men
now.”

Her co-worker Teresa Angeletta, 53, sees progress slipping away.

“It’s like when my mum would wait for my dad — he’d come home with his
wages and put them on the table,” she recalled. “She didn’t have money
of her own.”

How were these women ever independent? As the cutbacks show, they never
were, but had simply changed whom they depended on. Or had they: Weren't
these women all these years simply dependent on male taxes? Instead of
daddy coming home and laying his wage directly on the kitchen table, the
government did it, grabbing money from men. Women still didn't have
their own wealth.

Progress slipping away: How was grabbing tax from men to give to entitled princesses ever progress?

Recap: Women in the above article complain that they aren't receiving such a giganticbigger share from the government than men anymore, but a smaller bigger share.
Women complain that they live longer than men so need more gov
money. Women complain that they have to stay at home and mother children -
like mothers, for God's sake. Women complain that they might have to
accept money from a hard-working husband.

Ladies, you ain't independent, and you never were. If this article doesn't prove that, then you're hopeless.

____________________

*This reminds Ex Cathedra of the famous likely NYT headline when the Second Coming happens: World To End Tomorrow. Women And Minorities Hardest Hit.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

I ran across a few religion sites of the liberal persuasion recently and was struck once more with the overwhelming fetish about inclusion. Once inclusion becomes the dominant value, it becomes the only value, the only idea. Nothing else is possible, or even needed. But it is empty. It drives out all other values and ideas. The inclusive/egalitarian drive is cancerous and viral.

The Spiritus Christi (ex)Catholic Community --another word they swoon over-- in NY state. They broke with the RC Church in the late 90's over women's liturgical roles, gay unions and open communion. "Welcoming and including everyone", says on its website: Jesus said “no one who comes to my table will ever be rejected.” Lie. Never said that. At least not in Scripture. But I guess they think it's truthy.

Diversity and sensitivity are part of the new trinity, but they flow from inclusion, are mere modulations of it. A major major cultural trance is this need to level everyone. It saves you from thinking very deeply because equal inclusion is the only issue, ever. It is the feminine gone into overdrive, with affiliation becoming the only public virtue. Hierarchy, the male energy, is repressed so that loud affirmations of equality become a route to... power. Neat, no?

Like all forms of egalitarianism, one of its functions is to insulate the believer from moral condemnation and provide a ready mode of definition and difference against all the "unjust and sinful structures" of reality. My first lover was a seminarian whose quick mind was fueled almost entirely by his feeling function, one full of resentment and power drive, by the way. He came to define the Perfect Church as one in which the only people to be excluded were those who wanted to exclude anybody else. Like paranoia, radical inclusion is a closed loop. Once you are in the business of making everyone welcome and equal, who could possibly criticise you? And when you are done, what do you have left to offer? A night in which all cows are black? (And you can bet that some cows will be more equal than others.)

Dr. Dan Blatt of GayPatriot makes some FB comments on the Iliad and on works derived from it. I am reminded of the Achilles-Patroclus bonding. And Mary Renault's books. And then Mr B made a joke on the phone about the "Native Americans" and the berdache.

As far as I can tell, the public institution of male love in ancient Greece was significantly different from our construct of gayness in that, rather than challenging the role of masculinity in society, it served and solidified it. It was an initiatory part of the patriarchal system and bound by clear rules, ritual and boundaries. That does not mean that the men did not love each other; after all, marriage is also constituted by rules, rituals and boundaries. But it was an older-younger format, and temporary. The rules, rituals and boundaries appear to have been concerned to avoid societal shame, which I take to mean likeness to woman or slaves. Both men had to act with honor. It seems that sex between them was supposed to be intercrural, not anal: that would have been shameful for the younger receiver. Of course it does not mean they always kept all the rules, but the expectation was there.

In a funny way, it might be compared a little to the institution of the royal mistress. I am thinking of Prince Edward and Lillie Langtry as an example. In the elaborate court and gender etiquette of that publicly prim Victorian time, it was well known that she was his mistress, but again, with a set of rules, rituals and boundaries designed to foster the institution of marriage. And to give her definite power, dignity and social position within them. When she later became pregnant (by another prince), she had to go to France and she raised the child as her niece.

(Dan B reminds that Alexander had Hephaistion...not really the same as a male mistress though, but also not erastes-eromenos...how often did such pairings occur?)

And although gay cultural-studies types like to use the berdache institution as some kind of vindication of the non-homophobia of the wonderful Gaia-loving sustainable Indians, as they do of the martial and philosophical Greeks, that set-up also fostered rather than challenged the dual-gender regime of the tribes and was equally constructed of clear rules, rituals and boundaries. It was really closer to transgenderism than to homosexuality because it was focussed mostly on gender roles and symbols rather than sexual behavior. Berdaches were males who were ritually transferred into the world of the female (and much more rarely, females into the world of the male.) They dressed, acted like and, crucially, were restricted to the work of their new gender. As far as I know, there was no institutionalizing of a marriage-like relationship between two fully fledged men.

In the Greek case, the older male-younger male dyad was a training ground for the kind of men that the Greeks desired. It served societal masculinity and solidified it; it had, to my knowledge, no subversive or "alternative" function. The Indian system was a gender-crossing one, quite different from Greece. But it also supported the gender system, precisely in the way it allowed for exceptions. The exceptions proved the rule. And although berdaches had some status in the tribes, at least among the Blackfoot, joking about them was common.

To me, the novelty of contemporary gayness was...or could have been...the assertion that two fully fledged men could make an erotic and emotional bond that was not just initiatory but long-lasting and could do so as men, not as gender-benders. A combination of elements of the Greek and AmerIndian styles in something new. But it has turned out to be something else.

In the "gay" frame, with its founding structures of victimism, feminism and progressivism, being homosexual now means attacking and subverting masculinity (and femininity as well). While gay culture fetishizes masculinity physically and sexually, (witness gay porn), it critiques and contests it in every other way. Its activist leaders have taught gay males to find that a plus. But both societally and psychologically I find that attitude dangerously one-sided. And a lost opportunity.

It was summed up for me one day at my late lamented gym. One of the trainers was working out next to me and we did a little chatting. He had a bodybuilder's very worked-out frame and was quite handsome. With his string of attractive boyfriends (and his videos), I assume that he had a sexual energy to go with all that. But in many ways he had the personality of a teenage girl. And when I asked him --given his build-- if he had ever played football in school, he replied, "Oh, God, no. All that stupid breeder boy shit? No way."

Toward Our Future

What the sons of Europa need is a new religion: one that is as tribal, portable and survivalist as Judaism, as masculine, terrestrial and tough as Islam and as intellectually and aesthetically creative as Christianity...with a dose of the unflinching realism of the ancestral ways of the Greeks and Romans, Germans and Celts and Slavs..And for the larger Indo-European frame, something of the Indian capacity to combine an ultimate and philosophical realization of The One with a robustly mytho-poetic religion on-the-ground. Oh, and some of the psychological acumen of Buddhism.

Je ne suis pas Charlie Hebdo

In A Nutshell

Liberalism's Basic Flaw

Liberals believe that the chief role of the State is to force everyone to be equal, (ie, take vengeance on the successful). So when they are confronted with any group that they deem less well off than themselves, they are morally disarmed, completely and utterly. Any group that can achieve Victim Status is on their way to power and the (White) liberal's onlyjob is to give them what they want, no matter how much that damages him. And nothing may ever be expected, much less demanded, of them in return. It's a recipe for suicide: no other outcome is possible.

Demography as Destiny

"...then the end of the Roman republic was at hand, and nothing could save it. The laws were the same as they had been, but the people behind the laws had changed, and so the laws counted for nothing." Theodore Roosevelt, 1911

Multiculti Suicide

"Modern liberal societies in Europe and North America* celebrate their own pluralism and multiculturalism, arguing in effect that their identity is to have no identity."

Francis Fukuyama

Identity & Migration (2007)

*(White societies, that is.)

Equality's Dark Side (Oops, is that raciss?)

"“The sole condition which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced ... to a single principle.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835